


The Proper Treatment of Bears

by Dogsled



Series: Season 13 Codas [6]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Episode: s13e06 Tombstone, First Time, Hand Jobs, Love Confessions, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-02-03 16:07:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12751650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dogsled/pseuds/Dogsled
Summary: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERSSome deleted scenes from the episode "Tombstone". =D





	The Proper Treatment of Bears

_Breathe in. Breathe out._

 

“I don’t know what to say.”

 

_Breathe in. Breathe out._

 

“I do.”

 

He moves in slow motion. It feels like he’s walking through molasses. Castiel is right in front of him, alive and whole and smiling like he just won the biggest prize at the fair, and he _has_. Dean has. This is _his win_ standing in front of him, blue eyed and light as a summer breeze and there’s so much that Dean wants to say, so much he wants to _do…_

 

For a moment he almost considers _actually doing those things_ , and then Sam imperceptibly shifts beside him, rattling the timbers of the universe, and Dean feels self-consciousness take over. He’s very much _not alone_ here, and fear rushes in where apprehension had just a moment ago vacated the space. His eyes flicker away, his heart leaps, and he wraps his arms neutrally around Castiel’s back.

 

Pal. _Pal?_ Why was he such a fucking idiot?

 

He could feel Cas in his arms. For all the pleasure of the hug, he knows Castiel can sense it because the angel always knows. Castiel knows that he isn’t _fine_ , Cas knows when he’s holding back. There’s a tension beneath the grief and longing and hope and relief, and Dean squeezes tighter in an effort to reassure him, trying to explain somehow that _there’s more to all this_ before he has to reluctantly let go.

 

He has to let Sam get his hug too, and besides, he could have stood there all night, his arms wrapped around Castiel’s back, every breath a lance of iron hot mortality in his chest.

 

He breathes out. Even to his own ears the breath sounds rattled, but he smiles to watch Cas hug Sam, floored by the way relief sweeps over him all over again as though the mere act of observing a hug made all this seem that much more real.

 

It was all so very, very real.

 

 

*-*-*

 

 

There was always more.

 

Dean pulls on the lever and chocolaty rich bitter filter coffee empties into the cup, grateful, it has to be said, to whomsoever had filled the machine, though from the look of Cas squirming uncertainly at the table it was probably him: no doubt feeling apologetic for not preventing Jack from waking him up with a potential heart attack.

 

Burying his face in the mug he sank down onto the couch, vaguely listening to conversation continuing around him, interjecting when it seemed appropriate.

 

When Cas got up to leave he stalled for time.

 

And then they were alone; completely… _completely_ alone for the very first time since all of this had started, the first time since one $0.25c conversation on the phone which had ended far too soon. Clarity pulls focus abruptly, and his efforts to wake up no longer required black coffee. Fortunately, the mug being empty, he set it aside.

 

“You’re back.”

 

Cas must have been waiting for this. He says: “Dean—“ and Dean waves him quiet abruptly with a gesture of his hand.

 

“Just let me get this out. You were _dead_ , Cas. _You were dead_. I _burned_ you. I had to wrap you up in goddamn swaddling and—“

 

This time the breath he takes is to purposefully slow himself down. This isn’t what he wants to say at all, but it needs to be said anyway. All the slow drive back with Sam in the seat behind him Dean had fretted that Castiel would just vanish. How many times had he done just that? Winged away between one thought and the next with Dean in no condition to follow? Well this time he very nearly _had_ followed. From what Cas said they’d have been sleeping in eternity in the Empty together, probably top to tail and never knowing it.

 

Sam had explained everything about Jack despite knowing that Jack would tell the story again in his own words, but Cas had expressed confusion anyway. Of course he, like himself and Sam, had expected an infant child, not a full grown man. Boy, he was in for a shock.

 

But the whole time, gripping the wheel and staring ahead through the darkness, there had only been one narrative Dean wanted to tell, one thing he wanted to say and couldn’t because they never had a moment alone. It felt like he’d missed his moment back there and every wasted breath was killing him.

 

“What is it, Dean?” Castiel asked, carefully. There was something else about him now, something soft and reaching; warmth that just hadn’t been there before.

 

He spat the words out before his fear could rein them in.

 

“I never told you that I loved you too.”

 

The words rip the room in half. Dean can feel himself tipping over the precipice of humiliation, his face turning redder by the moment, his desire to take the words back screaming. All his excitement about this job was moot now, he’d gone and blown it saying those words and now Cas was going to question what that meant, or laugh at him, or…

 

“Dean…”

 

“No. No, don’t say it. Let’s just. Let’s just forget I said anything…”

 

“ _Dean,_ ” Castiel presses, just a little more firmly. He sighs. “We’ve both been such dreadful fools.”

 

“Oh. Oh great. So now I’m a fool?”

 

“As am I,” Cas continued. “Do you know I almost convinced myself that you didn’t? When you gave me that mixtape it seemed to me as though you might finally be prepared to say something, and I hoped but it never came. I know what a mixtape means, Dean. Metatron filled me in on the details, remember? And you filled it with music about sex… And then when I told you that I loved you…”

 

“Told _me?_ You said you loved _us_.”

 

“And I do, Dean, but how I feel about you…it’s a more profound—“

 

“I swear if you say ‘profound bond’ I’m going to donkey kick you in the face.”

 

Licking his lips Castiel tried another angle. “I was a fool, Dean, and so were you.”

 

Nodding Dean shifts uncertainly on his feet. The rip in the room feels electric now. It feels like wretched space between them, like the miles of road that he’d had to drive down with Sam screaming in his ear to take his foot off the accelerator. It feels like far too much, and yet Dean is terrified of what will happen when there’s no space at all. Will he panic like last time and pull away at the last second? What if he can’t commit? What if he’s too afraid?

 

If there’s anything Dean is afraid of, after all, it’s getting the intimacy he craved and then being the cause of it all falling apart; God knew it had happened enough times already as it was.

 

Cas seemed just as uncertain, just as afraid—maybe even for the same reasons.

 

“I love you too,” Dean finally managed. Those four words, full of lost opportunity, of things he’d almost never had a chance to phrase and things he was scared of losing all over again, brought tears to his eyes. “I should have told you then. I should have—“

 

Castiel’s on him in a heartbeat, almost as though the space between them had evaporated into thin air, warm hands framing his face all the preparation he has for a kiss sweeter than anything he’s ever known. The longing, the need, the relief… Just as he’d expected, it was far better than the hug had been, and Dean moves to reciprocate, grabs handfuls of Cas’ coat and spins him on the spot, pushing him hard toward the wall and…missing.

 

The swing doors fly open beneath their combined weight, and crash back on both of Dean’s shoulders at once, narrowly missing his head as, together, they crumble to the floor. It knocks the air out of them both at first and then the strangest thing: _laughter_ rumbles in Cas’ throat, and it draws a chuckle from Dean at once, and then reciprocal laughter; laughter through tears, desperate hiccups for breath interspersed with hungry kisses.

 

 

*-*-*

 

 

When Cas pleads with him to stop, it’s only so that they can get onto one of the twin beds, but looking at him laying there, half kissed to death and rumpled, his shirt partly open, Dean is suddenly struck by whimsy. Surrounded by all this cowboy memorabilia, it almost seems like a waste not to enjoy it. In all his years they’d never visited places like this. They were tourist traps, always too expensive to stay in, always too visible, and John was always strict about the kind of crackhouse day-laborer motels they kept to to stay off the radar and save money. This… Oh, this was splashing out, and Dean knew he wouldn’t get another excuse.

 

“ _Stay_ ,” he insists. Then: “On second thought take off the shirt.”

 

“ _Just_ the shirt?” Cas asks thornily, but Dean rolls his eyes and heads for the closet, stripping out of yesterday’s clothes. He finds Cas staring at him moments later, shirt still securely in place, and frowns in his general direction.

 

“Didn’t I say ‘ _get naked_ ’? I’m pretty sure that’s what I said.”

 

Dean looks at the bolo tie twice before he adds it to his hastily adapted sex cowboy look. Cobra-skin boots and leather gun belt over black slacks, with nothing left to the imagination above but his wide brimmed cocoa colored hat.

 

On the bed, Castiel is naked as the day he was… Well. Not the day he was born, but whatever. Dean doesn’t care. He cares, in fact, far less than he thought he would to see him with his thighs casually parted, his cock curling unabashedly toward his belly, the slightest precome beading at the tip.

 

Cas swallows, and Dean swallows too, and the aching of his own erection is suddenly unbearable, as though to ask: _just why are you standing over here?_

He crashes back into Cas as though in slow motion, hyper aware of his own body and where he’s touching, not wrapping his hand at once around the elephant in the room and instead bellyflopping back into a kiss as sweet and needy as the one that landed them on the bedroom floor in the first place.

 

Cas is everything Dean needs him to be in return. Castiel grips the back of his neck and pulls Dean closer, reaches down to hold him by the buckle of his gun belt and physically tugs their bodies against each other. It’s brutal. Dean can only imagine how it feels for Cas, his bare flesh against rough fabric, but he _seems_ to like it: gasps into Dean’s mouth as though he likes it and begs for Dean to touch him in such a way that it would be a crime to do anything else.

 

It’s not tidy. It’s definitely not _clean_. Kisses blur together and their hands fold into a concertina, fingertips touching fingertips as they both stroke together in time with Dean’s steady thrusting.

 

When Dean’s hat slips almost down to his nose Cas reaches up to right it with his free hand and says “ _Aloha, cowboy_ ,” with an impossibly straight face. Cas’ eyes practically twinkle. It’s enough to make Dean come at once, and afterwards, as they sink together down into the bed, Cas’ eyes still seem to sparkle with relief and desire, his breath tumbling against Dean’s neck as he dozes, so tempted to fall back to sleep in the safety of his lover’s arms, almost to spite the fact that Sam will kill them if he has to go visit the mortuary _and_ check in with the local sheriff.

 

Dean’s almost completely asleep irregardless when the softest kiss rouses him from his slumber. His eyes flicker open and he smiles. His angel is back. His angel is home.

 

“Mmm,” he breathes, contently. “Now _that’s_ how you wake up a bear.”


End file.
